Saturday, August 8, 2015

Where it All Began...

   While sorting through a stack of rulebooks in my warroom, I came across my original wargame rulebooks: "Rally 'Round the Flag"  and "Angriff!".    I got RRtF first, in the late '70's, at a small regional con at a college in PA. My parents had taken me because of my interest in Avalon Hill games, and at the con I was first exposed to miniatures gaming.  The rest, as they say, is history.  Heritage had a booth there and tending it was Duke Seifried himself.  We asked what I needed to get started in this "miniatures gaming" thing, and he set me up with some 15mm ACW packs, basic paints, and this rulebook. Kindly purchased by my mom & dad.  Needless to say, I was hooked.
 
     A year or two later, I purchased the "Angriff!" rules as my interests expanded into WWII.  Sadly, I don't remember where it came from, but I suspect a small brick and mortar hobby shop; as it became my standard procedure that whenever my parents and I traveled anywhere, I would look in the local phone book for any hobby shops and we would have to visit to see if they had anything miniatures related.
   Though I haven't played "Angriff!" since the early '80's, RRtF is still a great set of rules, which I would still pull out now and then to play as late as the early '00s.

6 comments:

  1. I remember RRTF - I think I played it in the 1990s before my group switched to Johnny Reb. It was as you say a good set of rules.
    Duke Seifred is an interesting figure in the hobby. I have his Napoleonics rules.
    Always fun to see how other gamers got going.
    Cheers,
    M

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  2. I had been a board gamer only until the first GenCon in 1968. Ray Johnson and his group brought Der Kriegspieler Napoleonics and his rules, "Frappe". In retrospect they were preposterously complex, but at the time I thought I had gone straight to heaven. As you said, I was hooked; until then it had never occurred to me I could use my Airfix figures in a game. (Imagination has never been my strong suit). There were no local stores that stocked Airfix, however, so I started ordering vast numbers of Revolutionary War soldiers from the backs of comic books. I came to learn later just how bad they were--they were not the rather nice flats sold earlier, but instead the barbarous soft plastic versions--so I never did anything with them. I later sold them to Wally Simon, and much later they made it to the HAWKS, who used them for the first Kids Project several years ago. Small world, eh?

    Best regards,

    Chris

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  3. Thanks for sharing! My friends and I used Angriff! back in the mid-70s, and I used them well into the 80s.

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    Replies
    1. You're welcome! I'm glad you enjoyed the trip down memory lane. :)

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